Data centers are large, important investments that when properly designed, built and operated, are an integral part of the business strategy driving the success of any enterprise, yet the central focus of organizations is often the acquisition and deployment of the IT architecture equipment and systems, with little thought given to the structure and space in which it is to be housed, serviced and maintained. This invariably leads to facility infrastructure problems, such as thermal hot spots, lack of UPS, rack power, lack of redundancy, system overloading and other issues that threaten or prevent the realization of the return on the investment in the IT systems.
HP Standardized Assessment Services Campaign Podcast Transcription
Assessments: Ammunition for Facts-Based Decision Making Richard L. Sawyer, Senior Principal, HP Critical Facilities Services Hello. Welcome to our podcast on Assessments - Ammunition for Facts-Based Decision Making. I'm Rick Sawyer, working for Critical Facilities Assurance Division of HP. We'd like to invite you to download the white paper on which this podcast is based. The white paper has significantly more information and detail than we can present today, but we look forward to your participation in downloading that. Data centers are large, important investments that when properly designed, built and operated, are an integral part of the business strategy driving the success of any enterprise, yet the central focus of organizations is often the acquisition and deployment of the IT architecture equipment and systems, with little thought given to the structure and space in which it is to be housed, serviced and maintained. This invariably leads to facility infrastructure problems, such as thermal hot spots, lack of UPS, rack power, lack of redundancy, system overloading and other issues that threaten or prevent the realization of the return on the investment in the IT systems. The solution is to fully understand the capacity of the data center to support the mission critical loads - which we define as the IT architecture; the availability, which is the uptime potential of the data center; and the condition of the key facility components and systems. Management then can make informed decisions based on facts, which leads to better direction of resources to close the known gaps between what is and what should be in systems reliability. Good management decisions rest on knowing what you have, what it can do, where investment gives the greatest returns. A well designed facility infrastructure assessment provides the facts needed for informed decision making, which minimizes waste in the form of misdirected investment, unrealized investment returns, and over or under sizing facility infrastructure systems needed to support the IT infrastructure. Let's discuss the basic problem. Many data center managers and operators do not know the capacity, utilization or availability of their data centers. This leads to the inability to support change in a business strategy, optimize the IT architecture with equipment refreshes or through consolidation and virtualization. It also leads to the inability to meet corporate mandates for efficiency or to realize the return on investment that was used in justifying project upgrades. Missing any one of these business drivers can range from what we call a career changing event or lost opportunity to significantly contribute to the success in achieving a business strategy. The solution to the problem is to base decisions on facts. A well designed and executed assessment supports the ability to respond to a change in the business environment. IT processing, systems and software are now an integral part of company offerings, either in distinct products - for example, software driving your digital camera - or services - for example, online, real time quotes from your car insurance company. The speed of business today is approaching real time, and change is the constant, not the exception. The ability to react to changes in the business environment quickly and effectively is not only a competitive advantage, but it is required in this day and age. Understanding your capacity and utilization levels helps you to understand your margin, which is the resources a data center needs to redirect and redeploy to effectively manage change. The solution seeks to optimize the IT architecture. Let's face it: the cost of computing has gone down markedly. More bytes of processing can be obtained per dollar invested than ever before. With this drop in actual processing cost has come a concurrent increase in the thirst of companies for more processing, as the software applications become key to business products and business efficiency. Instead of seeing a reduction in the size of the IT platforms due to increased processing capacity and ever smaller footprints, the number of platforms and systems has increased to meet business demands. This has led to large amounts of equipment with very low utilization levels - 10-20 percent is not uncommon - which means a lot of equipment is being used ineffectively and inefficiently. The ... [download for more]
